The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Various protocols and standards have been proposed and developed to facilitate communications between users and devices over the Internet. Some of the approaches use an IP address or a MAC address of a device to indicate two things, the identity of the device, and the location of the device.
However, in some situations, using an IP or MAC address to indicate both an identity and a location of a device can cause problems. For example, as a mobile device moves from one location to another, the MAC address of the mobile device remains the same, while the device location changes. Hence, using the device MAC address can be insufficient to determine the device actual location.
Often software applications rely on a device address as determinative for both the device identity and location. For example, an application that facilitates data communications over a TCP session can rely on an IP address of the device to establish the TCP session. However, relying only on the device IP address prevents the TCP-based application to seamlessly continue execution.
Further, if a network device starts using another port to communicate with the Internet, then the device receives a new IP address, even though the physical location of the device has not changed, causing problems in maintaining one, continuous communications session for the device. Hence, using a device address to indicate the device identity and the device location may be inaccurate.
Furthermore, even if accurate information about a device location is obtainable, procuring such information is often prone to security attacks.